So that was it, uttered: the fifth beginning.
The dogs were to be taken from my care and in their place was to be put the youngest of the King's mistresses. The practical matter which most absorbed me, as I left the King's presence, was that I could not remember how far from and in what relation to (viz. north-east or directly north of) London lay the county of Norfolk.
Chapter Two. Wedding Games
On her wedding eve, my future bride was to be locked, as custom dictates, with her bridesmaids inside her father's house. In the morning, I would ride to her door (from the rather lowly inn I would be forced to occupy on the night the sixth of June), with all the village running and shrieking before me, got up in homespun garters, love-knots, ribbons and general fooleries, playing flutes and viols and banging tambourines. I was looking forward to these proceedings. You do not need reminding that I am a glutton for foolishness, and this rowdy pageant was, in prospect, greatly to my taste.
I was also looking forward to putting on my wedding clothes, chosen by the King and made by his personal tailor: an admirable white silk shirt, a sash of purple, breeches striped white and gold, white stockings, purple shoes, gold-buckled, a black brocaded coat and a purple and black hat with white plumes of such magnificence that, from a distance, I appeared to be wearing a three-masted barque upon my head.
I had, of course, invited Pearce to the wedding, but he had declined my invitation, much to my chagrin. I would have liked Pearce to see me in my garb. I can only conclude that he refused, not from envy or mean- mindedness, but that he feared the sight of me might cause his circulation to cease, thus cruelly sundering him from his mentor, the late William Harvey, the first man to understand that blood moved in a circular motion, outwards from the heart and to it again via the pulmonary veins. 'Not a day passes,' Pearce once said to me, 'when I do not
To my bride's father, Sir Joshua Clemence, I had had to go, in mid-April, to beg his daughter's hand. The King, it seems, went before, to vouch for me as a man of honour, talent and wealth, owner of the country estate of Bidnold in Norfolk and desirous only of making his daughter contented and comfortable in all things, for as long as I should live.
So it was that Sir Joshua Clemence received me with great affability, pouring sack for me, averting his eye only fractionally when I spilt a little of it on the watersilk arm of my chair, and assuring me that the King's word was all he needed to deliver his pretty daughter into my hands. What I do not know is whether, at the time of the wedding, Sir Joshua already knew that Celia was the King's mistress. I suspect that he did and was flattered by the knowledge. For the King moves like God in our world, like Faith itself. He is a fount of beauty and power, of which we all yearn, in our overheated hearts, to feel some cooling touch. Sir Joshua struck me as an intelligent and in all respects noble person, yet even he, when he heard that the King was to be a guest at the wedding, couldn't conceal the hectic spots of joy that broke out on his cheeks. He told me that his greatest love was music, in particular the playing of the viola da gamba. 'Now,' he said rapturously, 'I will play at my daughter's wedding and at the same time achieve my life-long dream, that the King, restored to his throne, would one day listen to my music.'
With Celia, I had, prior to the wedding, half a dozen meetings, all presided over by the King, with whom my bride (as was generally gossiped round London) appeared so deeply in love that her hazel eyes hardly ever strayed from his face. I had a sense, at these meetings, of my own superfluity, but was too enthralled by the maps of Norfolk the King produced, on which to show me Bidnold Manor and its lands, to let this feeling discomfort me.
The glimpses I allowed myself of my bride confirmed her to be a pretty, small-featured woman of about twenty. Her skin was pale and absolutely without blemish. Her hands were tiny. Her hair was a weak brown, swept up from her face by ribbons and allowed to tumble to her shoulders in ringlets. Her breasts, I perceived, were meagre and her feet narrow. Her countenance, like her father's, was admirably serene. Though able to confirm that she was a quiet beauty, I was relieved to find that she was a woman not at all to my taste. She was too refined, her back held at too straight an angle, her curves too modest. Compared, say, to Rosie Pierpoint (despite the women available to me at Court, I had found it impossible to break off my riotous relationship with this naughty drab), Celia was as the mouse to the kittyhawk. In my amours, I crave the tearing beak and the cruel claw. I like a fight, a drubbing. The passivity I saw in Celia rendered her, in my darker imagination, useless.
What, then, of my wedding night? Well, I shall tell you in time, for no man in England can have had one so strange. But first, I must relate how I went with the King and Celia to Bidnold.
It was a Jacobean manor, moated and bordered by a substantial park, in which red deer harmoniously browse. Its interior was plain and dingy, reflecting the Puritanical tastes of the unfortunate John Loseley Esquire, its previous incumbent. Though struck by its drabness, I rejoiced in it. For from these plain rooms, I decided at once, I would fashion interiors that reflected, in their crimsons and vermillions, in their ochres and golds, in their abundance of colour and light, my own excessive and uncontainable nature. I would transform the place. I would open it up and let it explode with diversity, in the same way as the glorious complexity of the starling's anatomy had exploded to my eye in the shaft of light from the coal hole.
On my first visit, I bounded from room to room, leaving the King and Celia decorously perched on a Tudor settle, becoming, as my vision of the place began to catch fire, so boiling and flushed that I threw off my coat and unwound my sash and flung them down. My house! I had imagined passing my whole life in cramped apartments. Now, I had thirty rooms in which to spread myself. In one almost circular room in the West Tower, I let out an involuntary yelp of delirium, so perfect did the space seem – for what, I didn't know or care, I merely sensed in prospect the degree of perfection to which, in my mind, this space would one day arrive. It was as if, in the body of Bidnold, I had come at last to what Harvey called, 'the divine banquet of the brain.' And the banquet was mine! I sat down and took off my wig and scratched my hogshair and wept for joy.
Arrangements for the wedding went ahead, then, with all parties content with the arithmetic. That Celia and I had scarcely said a word to each other, and that she eyed me with some distaste did not appear to matter at all. The lengths to which the King had gone in order to hold onto her, in the face of Lady Castlemaine's jealousy, no doubt convinced her that his love for her was considerable. And he reassured her, as he had me: 'There will be no physical union between you. When I am not with Celia, you will give her brotherly companionship and she will order your house.'
'I prefer to order my own house, Sir.'
'As you will. A hostess can be invaluable, however, if you want to entertain at Bidnold, which I suppose you do?'
'Definitely, Sir. I am already dreaming of entertainments.'
'Good. I like you, Merivel. You are utterly of our times.' So, in a mood of feverish excitement, occasioned by my constant visits to plasterers, wall painters, upholsterers, silversmiths, tapestry-makers and glass cutters, my wedding day, the seventh of June 1664, approached.
How shall I describe my wedding? It was like a tolerably good play, a play of which, long after the thing is
